A Beginning at the End

by Mike Chen

  It would have been easy for her to shut down, play dumb, offer cursory input, and ignore him.

  Yet an hour later, Krista concluded that Rob wasn’t a bad guy. More importantly, he seemed to be a good parent. He clearly cared about Sunny—anyone who would practice the same speech over and over with a perfect stranger, even given the extreme circumstances, meant two things. First, he was willing to accept an outside opinion. Second, he worried enough about his kid to try.

  Her standards admittedly stood pretty low on the parenting scale. But even though Krista’s meter had been knocked into its own curve a long time ago, Rob’s situation warranted her attention, at least while stuck in an elevator. “No, see, if you say ‘I’ve tried to minimize’ then you leave yourself open to interpretation. Try ‘I know she’s doing well.’ Positive. And specifics. That’s how you get through to people.”

  “Okay. Positive and specific.” Rob blew out a sigh, his fingers aimlessly rolling the ring on his other hand. “How’d you get so good at this? I thought you were a wedding planner.”

  “Technically an event coordinator. I do stuff for businesses and communities too.”

  “Right. Well, you should be in human resources. You know how to nudge people.”

  Years ago, Krista’s therapist had told her that children of alcoholics like her mother picked up on subtle nonverbal cues as a survival mechanism. She opted to not go there with Rob. “Comes with the territory.”

  “Damn it, if only I had phone signal, I could call one of the parents from Sunny’s soccer team. I mean, we’re not like buddy-buddy but at least it’d be one charac—”

  A clang above interrupted Rob, then the lights overhead blinked to life.

  Krista responded by shifting her weight from one half-numb side to the other. The grime from the stale elevator air permeated everything, though the feeling of being stuck felt more suffocating than any faulty ventilation.

  “Are we gonna move?” Rob said. His laughter created an echo chamber as the elevator bounced and groaned before it made its way down. “We’re moving!”

  Krista snatched her boots off the floor, then looked straight up. Tiny spasms fired off in her back as she stretched; she should have done more yoga poses for her back instead of knitting. Damn her pencil skirt and its yoga-inhibiting design.

  The elevator rumbled downward, and the door soon opened, ushering in the best-smelling parking lot air Krista had ever experienced. Rob stepped one foot out and held his position with the other. “Hey, look,” he said, extending his right hand. “Thanks for talking me through this.”

  A handshake. Krista gave an internal sigh of relief; at least he wasn’t a hugger. “Oh, I didn’t do anything special,” she said, taking his hand. “My ass is sore and I smell bad but that would have happened regardless of whether we talked.”

  Rob laughed; he obviously didn’t know that Krista was being truthful. “I have no idea what I’m heading into.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Still no signal down here. So much for bringing a character witness.”

  “Good luck. And remember what I said about listening to her.”

  Rob took two steps out, then stopped. His head turned back and forth, and Krista could hear the very beginnings of words, though nothing formed fully. She started to move past him when his voice cut the silence. “Wait, please.” They met eyes, his a mix of inquisitive with a tiny bit of desperate. “Hey, look,” he finally said after several moments. “This is gonna sound weird.”

  “We’ve already established weird.”

  “Right. But...”

  “But?”

  “But...” He looked over his shoulder, presumably toward his car. “Look. This whole thing the FSB does, they wanna make sure you have like a hundred friends and do all these extra-curricular things and handle all the PASD stuff on top of that. And honestly, I just don’t know that many people. We keep to ourselves. A lot of people do. You’d be surprised. But I can’t just tell them that, I have to present something else. And I can’t get a hold of anyone. So, um—” his hands gestured to accent his words “—based on what you learned about me and Sunny these past couple hours, would you be willing to act as my character witness? If you don’t have something immediate to get to, that is. The school’s over in Nob Hill.”

  “Rob, I hardly know you. And I’ve never met Sunny. My job makes me a good bullshitter but not that good.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Okay, you’re right. Sorry about making it weird. Thanks for helping me practice.” He nodded and turned, took three steps away then turned back around, just as Krista had stepped out. “Look, what if I pay you?”

  “Pay me?”

  Those were the magic words. The envelope of cash in her purse flashed through Krista’s mind, along with the necessary amount to fill the difference for tomorrow.

  “Yeah. For a few hours of your time. What’s your consulting rate?” Rob asked. The door dinged and slid closed behind her. From above came the rumbling of a car rolling through the garage. “I’ll pay you. Whole day. Consider me a client. I’m desperate here. They want someone and I have nobody, and I’m already late.”

  Krista had taken on her share of strange client requests before, but this veered straight off into paid thespian tricks, something that she had zero experience with. On the other hand, bullshitting with clients and vendors, putting them at ease with little things like shaking her hand and breathing the same air as a total stranger, that was really what she did.

  Because even when business was rolling, no one wanted to do that after a pandemic. Only problem today was that people stopped wanting to have any sort of large gathering thanks to PASD-induced paranoia. And unless Hersh’s speech was “snap out of it and have a party, a wedding, or both,” that didn’t look to change soon.

  She locked on to Rob’s gaze. In another world, such a request would come across as, at best, bizarre and, at worst, offputting. But here, Krista didn’t find it all that strange—at least he cared. At least he was going to show up and fight for his daughter, despite being two hours late. She pictured Sunny waiting for him, the little girl with black hair in his phone photos. Was she being grilled right now by the principal? Lied to? Or maybe just waiting, wondering if someone would come?

  Krista knew that feeling. Some twenty or so years ago, she’d sat waiting at the windowsill of her mom’s friend’s house, yet another beg-and-plead set of weeks of couch crashing until they wore out their welcome. Things were unstable then, particularly when her dad randomly turned up for a short while before exploding again. That one afternoon raised the bar on chaos—and when the dust settled, she didn’t dare turn around to look further into the state of a home that wasn’t theirs. She’d heard the dishes shatter. She’d felt the walls vibrate when her dad punched them. The drunken slurs and screaming looped in her mind, despite things having gone quiet following her mom slamming the bedroom door and locking herself in. And it would all come to a head in a few hours when her mom’s friend came home to a wrecked house, kicking off the cycle yet again.

  In that house, Krista had sat with nervous anticipation, waiting for Uncle Dean to come back from medical school like he’d promised so they could go somewhere, anywhere, even for just a burger and fries. But he’d never arrived, and eventually she left the window, not to venture out, but as far as she could go inside: the bathroom at the back of the main hall. Door locked and lights out—most importantly, away from them—and her headphones blared while she sat against the chipped bathtub knitting the longest scarf ever made, at least until her iPod ran out of batteries.

  Someone caring would have made a difference. Two people, even if one of them was paid, might have even changed everything.

  Plus, Krista needed that Residence License. “Triple rate,” she said. Double rate probably would have been good enough, but desperate times and all that. “I’ll try my best.”

  Rob’s sigh of relief se
emed to fill the entire floor of the basement. He threw a thumbs-up, which Krista took in stride with a simple nod. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Follow my car, okay?”

  From the Online Encyclopedia page on MoJo:

  Johanna Moira Hatfield (b. July 14, 2000, Thorverton, Devon, England), better known as MoJo, was a British pop singer whose popularity peaked with the singles “Love This World” (#1 US, #1 UK), “Do You Remember Love?” (#5 US, #4 UK), and “We Can Win” (#1 US, #2 UK) in 2016.

  MoJo was born to Evan Hatfield and Iranian-born child-prodigy pianist Tala Ahmadi. Hatfield and Ahmadi met at the Royal College of Music in London, England, where Hatfield specialized in electroacoustic music and Ahmadi pursued her career as a classical pianist.

  Shortly after MoJo was born, Ahmadi was killed in a car accident in central London. Hatfield moved young Johanna to Manchester, where he raised her and began training her in voice and dance from a young age. Hatfield was often quoted as saying, “Tala would have wanted this for Johanna.”

  Chapter Seven

  Rob

  Halfway down the main hallway to the principal’s office, second thoughts started to creep into Rob’s mind. He hesitated, standing in an orange sunbeam filtering in from the dusk sky.

  “You want me to just make up stuff?” Krista asked, as if reading his mind. Her face lit up with a smirk as he pondered the possibilities in the deserted school hallway.

  “Let’s keep it simple. How about you’re doing an event for PodStar?”

  “Well, I am planning a wedding for your coworker.” Moira, the admin. She’d mentioned that as the reason why she was in the elevator in the first place. But right when she said that, her demeanor shifted into something inscrutable.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.” Krista bit down on her lip and looked off. “Moira’s getting cold feet, that’s all. It happens. But it’s fine. So one of your coworkers hired me and I’ve gotten to know you through her and you’re totally socially normal. The end. Good?”

  “Good.”

  They stopped a few feet outside the office door, and his hand shot up. “One thing,” he said, his voice dropping low in case Sunny listened from inside, “just don’t mention her mom. Elena.”

  Her mouth became a confused slant. “Why would I do that?”

  “Just...don’t. Sunny’s...” Why didn’t he think of this caveat earlier? Rob shut his eyes, thinking of the most delicate, least weird way to say this. “It’s a touchy subject. Please don’t mention her.”

  “Fine. I just know you through your coworker, remember?”

  “Right,” he said with a grin as he opened the door and walked in. Half of the room contained elementary school standards—photos of students and historical iconography—but sprinkled throughout stood various cartoonish safety protocols that applied only to the world that existed today. Rob had seen it all before, but there was still something disquieting about an anthropomorphized elephant giving tips on washing hands and putting on gas masks.

  From the back hallway, the sounds of chatter stopped. “Sunny? There was a power—” Rob’s musing was cut short by a bowling ball to the back of his legs, or at least that’s what it felt like. His knees buckled, and he angled to see a little mop of black hair above a bobbing mess of fingers and elbows and backpack.

  “Daddy!” Sunny’s voice rang out, and as he took in his daughter, he noticed Krista wince from the volume. Ms. Eswara, Sunny’s principal, trailed in, giving Rob a nod. She squeezed some sanitizer onto her hands, then passed the bottle along to both Rob and Krista.

  “I’m Rob’s friend,” Krista said with too much niceness in her words.

  “Sorry about being late. We got stuck from the power outage.”

  “I figured. It’s all right,” Ms. Eswara said. “Half the class pulled out early when word came down about the president’s speech tonight. And no one stayed for after-school day care. People are worried.”

  Hersh’s speech. Rob figured it would be about the headline he posted on the Metronet regarding the Miami fatality, but he had enough to worry about right now.

  In the history of the world, Rob was sure a seven-year-old never hugged with the brute strength that Sunny did. Her arms wrapped around his squatting body, and he closed his eyes so that all he felt was her presence and Elena’s memory. When he opened his eyes, Sunny’s arms loosened up. She pulled back, but rather than a welcoming face, she greeted him with her mouth creased in a firm scowl.

  “You lied to me, Daddy.”

  The words stole Rob’s breath, though he kept looking straight at his daughter. No one at the school knew the exact truth about Elena, but adults could piece it together if Sunny said too much. “Sunny, what do you mean by that?”

  “You said people always want you to tell the truth. But Noel laughed at me and made fun of Mommy, and you said—”

  “Okay, let’s back up a second. Noel, is he your classmate?”

  “He’s a poop face.”

  “Okay, now that’s not a very nice thing to call someone. I’m sure he had his reasons. And besides, you’re not supposed to talk about Mommy.” Sunny crossed her arms, squinting with the realization that she’d been caught. “You know, a lot of people lost their mommies around quarantine, and so we have to be, um, sensitive to that.” Rob didn’t tap into any sort of prepared explanation, but he gave himself a mental pat on the back for conjuring something so quickly. “Maybe Noel did too, and he’s just upset about it.”

  “Sunny.” Ms. Eswara knelt down to her level. “I need to talk with your daddy for a few minutes. Can you stay here with...?”

  “Krista Deal.”

  “Can you stay with Krista?”

  Sunny shot Rob a look, which he forwarded to Krista. “I thought you’d want to talk with Krista?” he asked Ms. Eswara.

  “If we have time, yes. The blackout’s thrown everything off. But we need to speak first.”

  “It’s fine,” Krista said. “Don’t forget, I work on weddings. Deal with kids all the time.” Even though she said that, Rob felt her demeanor shift just slightly into something more tense. Still, they were all in too deep to pull out now. He watched as Krista dug into her purse for something, but Ms. Eswara interrupted. “Back here, Mr. Donelly.” She started walking to the back office.

  “Thank you,” Rob mouthed to Krista before offering his daughter a reassuring smile.

  * * *

  Rob politely declined the disposable breathing mask offered by Ms. Eswara, then immediately second-guessed it. Was not wearing one a sign of lazy parenting? Was it a subtle test that would be a ding against him later?

  Before he made peace with those questions, Ms. Eswara launched right into it. “Mr. Donelly, tell me about Sunny’s home life.”

  This opened up another issue—what did Sunny actually say about Elena? Rob made an internal promise to keep the topic of mothers and their alive/dead state as vague as possible. He tried to recall the speech he’d practiced in the elevator, but under the scrutiny of a governmental decision, the whole thing vaporized, leaving him to wing it. “Well, she’s happy. At least I like to think so. As much as you can be in this world. Her best friend moved to Reclaimed a few months ago and she doesn’t quite understand that. I think that’s affected her a bit. But really, I think we’re all affected. And when you hear about PASD nonstop on TV, on the radio, in conversations, it’s kind of hard to not let it just become part of you by exposure, you know?”

  “Do you think she’s affected by PASD? This is the third outburst in a short time.”

  “I know she misses her friend a lot. And sometimes we’ll see bits of an old movie and she’ll ask why things aren’t like that, where did all the people go, that sort of thing. She’s...” Rob searched for the right word. “Headstrong. She wants to do the right thing. She just gets ahead of herself sometimes. People told us
that would serve her well as an adult.”

  Us. It’d been a while since that counted, maybe all the way back to right before the quarantine, when their friend Gail had told them that based on her child psychology background, then almost-two-year-old Sunny was a textbook high-energy child, and that high-energy children grew up to be leaders.

  “And you? Are you affected by PASD?”

  This was a delicate question. Too much chest-thumping and he’d clearly be lying. Too much self-pity and they might consider him a Greenwood-style risk. “I think when you see people you know, people you love wither away in a few days, it’ll always affect you.”

  “I believe we recommended counseling, either in private sessions or PASD support groups, following Sunny’s last outburst. Have you attended any? Has Sunny?”

  “It’s been hard to find time for that. But it’s a priority.” Each word came out with precision, a carefully crafted blend of contrite and excuse. “In fact, there’s one right by my office at PodStar. Work’s been really busy since the power outages started, and it’s a high priority to keep the Metro government offices connected to the feds.”

  He sure hoped Krista was better at this.

  “I see.” It took Rob a second to realize that Ms. Eswara was shuffling papers on her lap, probably with these questions. Whether she purposefully hid them or not, he wasn’t sure. “And we should discuss Sunny’s mother.”

  Muscles tightened at the very question—his toes, his shoulders, his jaw. His whole body became a knot with no clear way to untie it.

  Rob couldn’t let the school or anyone involved with the Family Stability Board know that Sunny believed Elena to still be alive. Or that someday, she’d come home from “treatment.”

  “It’s...not easy to talk about.”